PLAYER COMMENTS ABOUT BIOSHOCK INFINITE
Sitemap COMMENTS FROM PLAYERS AND ONLINE REVIEWERS OF BIOSHOCK INFINITE (Ones you were NOT going to hear from magazines and reviewers who the game company had Paid Advertisements with). ' ***WARNING*** Fanbois may want to stick their heads in a bucket of sand, cuz there's ALOT of negative comments here. ' * See Also Rapture Bioshock Player Commentaries * See Also Infinite_BS & Infinite Stupidity * See Also PLAYER_COMMENTS_ABOUT_BURIAL_AT_SEA ---- "The original BioShock was one of the best video games ever made. Bioshock Infinite was an over-hyped, stripped down version of the original that betrayed its hardcore fans. Awful replay value." ---- "Levine's "Vision" for Columbia ? You mean Rapture with a bad Coat of 1900 slapped over it ?" ---- "I find the game's storyline a bit cringeworthy, though not any more so than other in-universe handwaving of authorial fuckups. (Bioshock Infinite's in-story explanation of why they made the same game in essentioally the same setting again - because there's, like, alternate realities and some junk - was the worst). Bioshock Infinite had the same type of base setting and storyline as the previous Bioshock because it was a new installment in a popular franchise and staying on-brand. Instead of just going with it as the usual sort of thing, they felt the need to "excuse it" by throwing in a bunch of clumsily overwritten mystical mumbo-jumbo about how "theres always a lighthouse, theres always a man". I found it excruciating. There's nothing worse than making excuses for your storyline: Its a couple degrees worse than lampshading something ridiculous by having a character squeak out Its like something out of a B-movie/bad TV show/comic book! " ---- "The lazy, pointless, and offensive "equivalence" narrative that opens the second half of the game." : Fundamental weakness in the game's construction : BioShock Infinite is strewn with poorly-tuned and irrelevant mechanics. The inability to carry health supplies and the tiny peripheral areas make the classic scrounging mechanics feel useless. The strict two-weapon carry limit makes the game's menu of overlapping weapons and their multitude of upgrades seem at once overwhelming and irrelevant. The lockpicking system feels completely superfluous, in part because side areas are so small, and in part because the only locks that really matter don't require lockpicks. Infinite's late-game combat zones tend to be large and open arenas with minimal cover and defilade. With enemies inserting and firing from all directions, battle becomes increasingly chaotic and lacks any narrative feel. Without interesting secondary antagonists or strong level design, combat feels directionless and perfunctory - an emotionless exercise in elimination, even when an evocative enemy does show up. The industrialist Fink feels like a retread of ideas examined in Rapture. When Fink's downtrodden workers successfully revolt, they almost immediately become villainous. The game's attempt to establish an equivalence between angry laborers and the dehumanizing system of oppression that produced them is lazy and unmotivated. Worse, it unavoidably endorses the views of Columbia's racist elites, for apparently no better reason than to give Booker differently-colored enemies to shoot at. Infinite gets bogged down in the quantum mumbo-jumbo it uses to explain itself, losing track of the details as it barrels onward through an ever-less-interesting landscape. The game's locations become less evocative of the Columbian way of life, and their design contributes to the combat's decline, particularly in the meaningless battles that conclude Columbia's story. Increasingly, the porous logic of Infinite's story doesn't hold up under examination, and the game undercuts its attempt at a neat, tidy ending by preceding that with a twenty-minute explanation why it doesn't work. Fuzzy-headed narrative and thematically irrelevant auxiliary mechanics make Infinite feel sloppy even when it's working. Combat increases in frequency and decreases in impact after the Hall of Heroes, so for most of its length the game sinks towards a deflated ending. The closing scene, the impression it leaves is strong, but the emotional connection it trades on, however, has almost nothing to do with the game's actual play. ---- "Recently we’ve all gotten the chance to photograph the corpse of Irrational Games itself, which closed its doors in the aftermath of Infinite’s perilous production and complicated reception. I’ve come to believe that in the histories we write about our world there are only two salient constants: There’s always a corpse, and there’s always a camera. " ---- "The game is a disappointment. It was hyped so much that in the end it just shatters before succeeding in what it is attempting to do. BioShock 1 was a lot better than this. Despite what you'll read in all of the super glowing reviews, Infinite is a cop out because it basically just takes BioShock and puts it in the sky but with none of the things that made that game phenominal. ---- "Plenty of sequences in this game were ridiculously violent and grotesque." ---- "It all looks like just an excuse to have a flying big daddy in the flying city." ---- A Short But Sweet Comment : "The plot itself is so fucking forced, contrived, over-extended, badly paced, and full of billions of holes (that apologists and fans have no good answers for), that it's impossible to really take seriously." ---- "It's yet another case of devoting a massive amount of time/money/etc. almost purely to artwork when the gameplay itself stagnates and becomes yet another interactive cutscene." ---- "The game moves away from the silent loner protagonist to some Pinkerton douchebag who has to babysit some mentally disturbed child with Super-Tits. The gunplay looks incredibly game-y and cheap, the jumping around on rail-lines just feels gimmicky and unnecessary, the strolling scenes where Elizabeth tells you some stupid story suggest a more linear, cutscene driven game. Finally the bloody brick road leads back to Rapture." ---- Linear is "Linear" : "Ironically, in the face of all this streamlining, they added needless and frustrating backtracking and getting lost to BioShock Infinite in the form of badly designed side missions." ---- "BSI : a popamole shooter" ---- "Levine in his 1900s fake America game setting missed out by not having his "Founders" in Columbia have human skin lampshades". "So many plot holes that they could have opened a cemetery" ---- "In the end, all I can say is : At least Bioshock Infinite made most of its expenses back so it wont negatively impact other more successful game genres for Rockstar." ---- "The exploration is somewhat illusory; some of the maps are big, but they're deeply non-interactive and you can't actually explore as much as you'd like to. We see all sorts of parts of the floating city off in the distance; we just can't visit any of them. Welcome to the city in the sky. So much to see and do, except you can't, because most of it is off limits. Even if we slow down and spend our time hunting for the various secrets, it's not particularly fulfilling. A big issue is those damn audio recordings—if you don't find them all, the story makes substantially less sense. Many of them are pretty dull, but plenty contain important snippets of information. So we have the worst of all worlds: in order to make sense of the story, we have to play a silly game of hide-and-seek, and in playing that game of hide-and-seek, we suck the life out of the story." It's immersion-breaking, and it's lazy. I'm playing an interactive audio-visual experience and the best you can do is make me listen to recordings? " ---- A Cowardly portrayal of Racism and a Racist state If Farcry could have you climbing out of being buried in a pit full of bodies, at least they could have some meager realistic racialism scenes. That Stupid baseball bullshit scene ... a public stoning with festivities. Levine should be ashamed of himself. ---- Levine might be trying to impart the player with the idea of "an illusion of choice" - an idea held by some people who are deluded into thinking there merely exists "an illusion of choice" in their real life. But for a GAME where players, who want to feel they have achieved something, to then push their noses into some staged "THERE IS NO FREE CHOICE IT IS ONLY AN ILLUSION" game experience is a cheat and swindle ( Levine, go do an 'indie' film if you want to try to be this clever). The early BioShocks had this too some extent, but it went into hyperdrive for BS:I ---- "With the game obviously thrown together apparently after rewrite and rushed production, it begs the question of whether the delivered game constituted the original intent. Various interviews were given saying much more was intended, but is that just an alibi attempting to cover up the delivery of inferior work ?" ---- "Normal people in a 1912 floating city throw money in the trash because why the hell not. It sort of takes the bite out of the social commentary to have a guy complaining about not getting paid enough to scrub floors when I fished $30 out of a dustbin not 5 feet away from him." ---- " Irrational was a developer where there are a lot of great artists and sound designers, and Levine was obviously kind of a visionary (of a sort), but nobody there had any real critical capacity to ask questions about things, point out flaws and holes so they can be fixed, that sort of thing. I also get the sense that Levine, for all his prestige, really is not a very good designer outside of envisioning settings and characters. Infinite, to me, feels like an attempt to be intellectual and artistic but without any of the knowledge, talent or wit to really back it up. Every time it tries something interesting it is always brought down by more 'videogame shit.' " ---- "I really loved the original atmosphere from the first 2 games, but didn't care for the atmosphere in infinite. I don't know if it was the setting, or the game mechanics, but infinite just didn't give me the "bioshock" vibe I had playing the first 2." ---- "Contemporary anti-racism in art is a universal middlebrow supplement - it makes anything more socially esteemed and, at the least, wards off critics from kicking the tires before giving the ideological thumbs-up. The game would dig through a shitpile for a soggy corn kernel of respectability and video game critics want to dive facefirst in to help." ---- "The same failure to integrate narrative and gameplay that plagued BioShock, as BioShock made money so they copied the formula. It was another generic shooter that happened to be set in a cool environment, nothing more." ---- "The game suffers from arbitrary shooting syndrome " ---- "I find this "Vigors" thing really ... out of place. In B1 Plasmids was legit because it's linked to the plot, but in BI it's just forcing it on you. What? You just fucking DRINK it and you'll be able to cast mind control and fireballs? And they're even giving these drinks for free in fairs? " - "Really, you could kill off Booker by just getting a bottle of rat poison, sticking a fancy name on it, and putting it on display in front of him." ---- Jebus Save us all. This game looks shit. Did they really fool retards with blooming and blurring this shit all over? It's fucking hideous. You can't even turn it off in the option menu. I think they were aware that after shutting this graphics shit down this game would look worse than Oblivion. Low res everywhere, shit copy-pasted models everywhere. The first hour they force us to passively walk through the corridor they called "a city", where you can't interact with shit, only see few posters and you grab all the money and apples you can find. Apparently, noble citizens (with such fancy names like "MALE CITIZEN 1", "FEMALE CITIZEN 2", "POLICEMAN 1") don't give a fuck you're robbing their shop in front of them. Stealing all the money, searching in trashbins, bumping all the time into people doesn't seem to interest them. It seems they rehashed BioShock storyline and setting all the way, with tasty "social commentary" that causes hipsters and popamole crowds to get wet at this title, just to show that they dig into "2deep4u" stuff. ---- "I wasn't impressed with BioShock Infinite. Gorgeous visuals yes, but just too twee and the gameplay left me cold. Give the claustrophobic, chill-inducing interior and the maniacal screams of splicers in Rapture anyday." ---- "It walks aimlessly through many themes and it fails to deliver on anything. They try to hide mediocrity by throwing mountains of shiney polished shit towards the player and it works for a while. But then the shit starts to pile and soon the emptiness of the game design is apparent. The game fails to deliver on its potential. So much money was wasted for this." ---- "The game capitalize on cretinous cliches : segregated society, all religious people are nuts, capitalism is exploitation ... blablabla. This game is crafted for wannabe hipsters infused with inculture and emotional confusion." ---- "If you could have flown about on steam powered wings it might have been a truly visionary game. To climb on and soar among the towers of that floating city. Instead you got another ordinary shooter game, couched in dyslexic technobabble, with levels of endlessly repetitive massshooting sprees, and some soppy storyline wedged in-between." (( They couldn't do any decent 3D movement in their FloatyShit™ world because they cannot handle the Player freedom it would require, and require far more detailed props which the Player might see/interact-with close up. )) ---- "In the end no transgression from the invisible corridor is allowed. Not even the trendy multi-colored endings. There is only one ending for an infinite number of universes. Levine fails to comprehend his own work. A hack with too much publicity." ---- "I've just replayed the entire series from start to finish and Infinite seemed like a completely different franchise. I found the game lacked direction at times and a lot of the game consisted of walking around. Stunning visuals but there was hardly enough action. Unlike the previous 2 games where there was action in every corridor. I have not played a game like Bioshock since it's creation." ---- The Proposed Infinite game was really about what mighta been with racism and americanism. Morphed. All that interview explanations (latter parts of the promotional campaign they spent millions on) about "real" science stuff that was to be in the game which was really just salesman rubbish. (( '' Faux (fake) america, science, religion, technology, history, social understanding ... Really just a regurgitated 'pretty' wrapper for a mediocre game, produced overbudget and overtime, and a mishmosh of pretentious ideas and bad interpretations. '' )) ---- Statement : "Ken Levine may have some talent in story writing" Comment : "When and where was this ? I'm a big fan of BioShock (not Infinite, because it was straight garbage on every level), but the first game is about a cartoon 1920s gangster who lives in an underwater city and wants to kill a guy who skimmed Atlas Shrugged and thought it was cool, and he does this by pretending to be a cartoon Irishman and arranging for a typical video game protagonist to run through town. It has okay moment-to-moment writing, and incredibly good environmental design and atmosphere, but the actual narrative of the game's dumb as hell. " ---- The story... BioShock was about a city underneath the ocean but that was at least somewhat believable. You might be able to believe in that, but a city floating in the clouds? My first gut reaction to that was the same one I'm having now despite the fact that I convinced myself otherwise. I told myself that I probably would like it just as much as bioshock 1 even though its setting is beyond stupid but I was wrong. The game is just not believable. There are several plot holes and inconsistencies that ruin the experience. And Elizabeth... I knew all along that a permanent NPC tagging along the entire game would ruin it and she does. She never shuts up and she gets in the way when you're trying to run somewhere. I don't care if she has hundreds of lines of dialogue because she points out obvious crap and I don't care about her. I feel like I want infinite to be about me and my exciting adventure in the floating city, but instead it's about this annoying character's feelings all the way through. Her behavior is disgustingly predictable. First she likes you, then she goes through an omg I hate you phase, and spazes out and knocks your character out (because you're too stupid to handle yourself even though you're capable of slaughtering 500 enemies...) I really don't understand why are people so overwhelmed by this game. Not even the graphics are that stellar. It is such a clever ruse, all that bloom, fog and light shafts are well placed to cover poor models and textures in general. Next thing is horrible collision zones, at first it was not a big deal but it became more and more annoying. I bought this game mainly for the story and characters, but it is not good, and are mix up of several clichés with several ups and downs. The enemy AI is quite poor and you will see big number of enemies stucked in some obstacle. There is also that unpleasant fact that this game embrace only checkpoint saves. Also difficulty is pretty low i cannot even imagine how easier the game could get on lower difficulties. There are no amazing villains like Andrew Ryan or Fontaine, or Shodan. No. Instead you're supposed to fear and respect an old dude with a beard. Oh and he's a racist. Wow, let's just hit all of the stereotypical bad guy traits on the checklist. So yeah, if he's that generic and he's supposed to be the antagonist, yawn-o-rama. This thing is just an easy copy paste of bioshock with a much weaker generic story in the sky instead of under the water. It's not believable, it's not interesting, scary or heart wrenching, it's just boring. And that is the worst sin a game can commit. ---- "Levine's excuse for hiding the 1999 mode til after you play once through was to not discourage players with something too hard. So he is basically calling his customers retards." ---- "It doesn't feel like a world at all, more like a set of props." ---- "I didn't think it was possible to dumb down BioShock. AAA industry hits new lows every day." ---- "This is one of the most pretentious game endings I've ever had the misfortune to witness. Can we go back in time and drown Levine?" ---- "BioShock Infinite among most expensive games of all time" (So little for so much money) ---- "Cheap, railroaded synthetic drama, all that wrapped in gameplay full of boring violence happening in a world filled with expensive art assets but which does't make any fucking sense." ---- "The game had a lot of problems with character consistency and overall setting's premise wasn't very well established (did the protagonist know about the fairy tale city before he was sent there? Did he know about the Vigors? Why was he so casual about such things but went full 'wtf' when Elizabeth's powers were revealed?)" ---- "Would probably be a good game if you could take the world seriously, it's just really hard to do it. You go from one extreme to another waaaay too fast and too often. 10 min of gameplay for the debate class, 10 for the jocks, 10 for the drama club, then mix them up for the greater good. Racism is bad, brutal slaughter, "Oh how could you kill those people", back to brutal slaughter, step behind a register alerts police, slaughter everything in sight a bit later and nothing happens. The new trademark of AAA titles, throw everything into the mix, and don't focus on anything properly because you might alienate some part of the audience." ---- "In the closing 20-minutes the player does little except get an extended “explanation”, and I'd dispute the notion that this is somehow the pinnacle of video games because there's enough that's simply average, like the actual layout of the levels (aside from sky-lines), that those making this claim are simply seeing something that isn't present in this dimension." ---- "The game is entertaining, but it's also tragically marred by the unshakeable sense that it could have been so much more and simply got lost along the way." ---- Quote of one of the Game Reviewers : "There’s a difference between plot holes, which are excusable, and a disregard for internal logic." (( '' That is Infinite BS (and its DLC) in a nutshell '' )) ---- Review Nuggets About Combat in Infinite BS : "There are people everywhere, yelling, and I just sort of fire off Murder of Crows in a direction and shoot where I see the 'vulnerable' signifier." "I jump onto a skyline and keep getting nailed by bullets—I have no idea where the enemies are, but I rely on the auto-aim from skylines to find someone to shoot at." "To provide difficulty, designers overwhelm your Shields all the time, which means designing situations that are Spammy (get hit from all directions so you can't process what's going on). Its confusing and not fun. It feels messy to play and happens all the time because they have to. Infinite then has super attacks which take away all your Shields at once, AND a third of your health, which feels steeply unfair. These Shields train the player to ignore getting hit most of the time, which becomes grating at the end when opponents start hitting hard. (the players are trained for one thing, but then get attacked differently !) Shooters are much stronger experiences when it matters when you get hit. In Shield games you get hit all the time, like flies buzzing." "To me that's piss-poor combat gaming." ---- BioShock Infinite, What It Is, Unfortunatley : "The world itself is kind of thin — characters stand stock-still, repeating the same animations over and over, everyone looks and speaks the same way. The game only comes to "life" when it's time to start blowing shit up. How remarkable it would have been, had the focus instead been on building AI that acted believably in the world, rather than simply AI designed to shoot and dodge. The piss-poor combat took all the effort and left the rest of the game ever poorer." "It's possible to like the game for all it tries to do, but still feel smothered by its insistence that so much of my experience is delivered staring down the barrel of a gun or other destructive weapon. The game's story isn't really about shooting at all, but the player's lived story is, and that alienation is hard to overcome." "The original BioShock was praised so highly because it was so unique. BioShock Infinite retreads a lot of the same ground, at least mechanically, but with parts that aren’t nearly as diverse or varied as its predecessor...Its enemies are uninspired and its world not nearly as rich." ---- "If violence wasn't the chief aim of the game then why have an action called "Execution" ?" ---- "Even in 2013 with US$200,000,000, Ken Levine cannot make decent character models. The less-well-bribed AAA reviews indicate that the story becomes completely retarded after a point." ---- "Really bog-standard Combat. Fans would forgive the game for its mediocre combat. Unfortunately, the story which was supposed to counterbalance that deficit was not delivered, no matter all the yada-yada about it being exceptional contained in the developer interviews." ---- "The worst culprit is the ending. The plot's final emotional sting is an action that just doesn't seem like it would achieve anything. It seems to be assuming some new rule about how this world works – but since those rules were never established, any drama that hinges on them feels arbitrary. That completely deflates the ending's potentially enormous impact." ---- "Infinite’s biggest issue is that the stiff nonplayer characters really dampen the impact of the social themes. Irrational worked so hard building this world filled with terrible racial imagery, but it’s difficult to feel the effects of that when I can’t relate to the mechanical mannequins that populate Columbia." ---- "Took me over an hour to get to combat... it's a video game, not a god damn virtual museum." ---- "You're on a flying city of magical racists in 1912, and that soon drops to being only the fifth or sixth most puzzling thing about your situation. Who are those two? Why are they talking about me? What's with the giant cyborg bird? What does AD stand for? How does he know... why does she think... when did they... why can I shoot crows from my hands? And how do these pants help me reload?" ---- "The violence in the game is jarring. One moment you arrive in a floating city and walk amongst its inhabitants, seeing how they mingle and live and the next you're drenched in blood murdering them by the dozen. Even the devs commented how you're basically a psychotic mass murderer when it really boils down to it." ---- "Where the fuck did they wasted so much money, on Elizabeth boob simulation? Is the mainstream gaming industry becoming a scheme to milk clueless investors? What crazy investor would think that its a good idea to waste 200 million dollars on a popamole shooter with 8 hours of gameplay? If this thing was a open world game, you could explain the budget." ---- "The strange religion in Columbia may have been more interesting if it had been based on some Jewish cultism, and the story set in a flying Communist dystopian state. No matter, as the combat was rather poor which made it far less interesting to play between the cutscenes." ---- "I'm sure it would be decent for $5. The problem is that it gets a 95% because its shit easy and panders to the generic sensibilities of hipsters who can't play games." ---- It's a spectacular ending. It's just a shame it doesn't make a lick of sense. "The plot really does jump the shark. It jumps a lot of sharks. It jumps BioShark Infinisharks" ---- "In cheerful contrast to the original BioShock's deep-sea madhouse, the flying city of Columbia is still thriving, still beautiful, and still populated – albeit with magical racists." ---- "Setting in Infinite: Boring Supermario cloud world. Can't interact with the populace, feels fake and rigid. Loot = gold and ammo. Follow the arrow, shoot hp-bloated badguys. Tons of cinematics interrupting the game. Graphics : Hidden behind tons of flares and layers of spectacular lightning are relatively unimpressive graphics. Just look at booker's hands, or any character model. Story : One singular storyline, pretty straight-forward with a predictable incoming twist. A Non-reactive world." ---- "The AI is incredibly dumb, and the world is a sterile theme park which you are railroaded through." ---- "Too many themes blended together turned into forgettable muck." ---- '' BioShock - The Player Embracing the Setting - NOT !!! '' : "In the game’s fiction I do not have the freedom to choose between helping Atlas or not. If I accept to adopt an Objectivist approach (self-serving), I can Harvest Little Sisters. If I reject that approach, I can Rescue them. Under the story, if I reject an Objectivist approach, I can help Atlas and oppose Ryan, but if I choose to adopt an Objectivist approach – well too bad... I can stop playing the game, but that’s about it." (( '' The game was not versatile enough to allow the player any real freedom. As it turned out the 'Rescue' of Little Sisters rewarded you pretty much the same as Harvesting them. '' )) ---- " The problem with Sequels is that they just copy the originals, badly. This holds true for BioShock : infinite. " ---- "There was clearly something wrong, because the game has a totally disjointed feel. The "lol multiverse" plot was shoehorned into the game because it provided a convenient way to wrap it together. Obviously, from Levine's statements and pre-release footage, Infinite is not even close to what it started as. I have a very hard time believing they set out to make a game about M-theory. BioShock was praised for critiquing a social/political/economic system, so in order to one up that, they set out to make some time travel/multiverse story? No way. The game does not make any deep commentary on anything, which is a far cry from BioShock, and something that Levine could not have set out to intend. The Class Warfare, American Exceptionalism, and other themes are simply abandoned and never resolved. Now I'm fighting a ghost? Oh, look, an Insane Asylum that has nothing to do with anything? Fitzroy, whose entire existence is premised on equality and not judging people superficially, decides she has to kill a totally innocent child whose only crime is being related to someone she dislikes? Booker's choices effectively do not matter because he has made every choice across the multiverse(s), so why even rescue Elizabeth? There are an infinite number of universes where Booker does not sell Elizabeth, so what makes this one special? Moreover, if drowning himself "kills" Comstock, are there not an infinite number of universes where he never drowns himself? How in the hell could that possibly kill Comstock for good across all realities under the guise of the multiverse? It can't, and it makes no sense. That is the problem with these multiverse stories--they trivialize this reality by making everything reality. Booker's actions are meaningless because he has taken all roads across all multiverses. I'm sorry, but this story is not deep in anyway, and it cannot have any deep meaning because of resolving it with multiverses. It's a pseudo intellectual deus ex machina, and people seem to be eating it up for reasons unknown." ---- "At the end right after Booker says, "Why are you still upset / Let's just open a door to Paris" (paraphrasing here), Elizabeth replies with, "No, just THAT Comstock is dead. He exists in an infinite number of universes." ... So... your plan is to kill him an infinity number of times? Or do you think that by lecturing your dad before he knows he's your dad just to mind-fuck him JUST before you drown him will somehow kill EVERY OTHER universe that exists where he's still alive / you didn't drown him? Ceremonially drowning our instance of Booker does NOT "close the loop". Nor would it cause all those other instances of Elizabeth to "not be" / pop out of existence; JUST the one from our game would have." ---- * The criminally underdeveloped villains and side characters (Fink, Slate, Fitzroy, etc ...) * The "Carrot on a Stick" plot device that made up the entire middle section of the game. * The complete abandonment of all the themes they built up for the first half of the game once the tear stuff really got rolling. * The very average gunplay which runs out of ideas halfway in. * The dumb as rocks, bullet-sponge enemies who's only AI pattern appears to be running at you. ---- "For a game supposed to be about story, so many character elements are poorly explained in their stories." ---- "The game is haphazard, full of holes, not many connections to tie together. They make a half-assed attempt at the end to answer some questions, and all you are left with at the end of the game is, 'What the f*ck?' " ---- "As purely a gaming experience, BioShock Infinite cannot quite match up to its illustrious predecessor. Combat is not particularly varied or customizable, and neither the large number of guns and ‘Vigors’ (magic powers, a la BioShock’s Plasmids) or the Skyrail system compensate for this. Although the last quarter introduces some welcome variation in play, most of the game shooting is the sole method of progression. The hacking sub-game, an enjoyable diversion in the original’s games main action and a way to access additional resources, is replaced by a ‘Possession’ Vigor, giving control of opponents merely on a simple point and click basis." ---- "Infinite seemed like a completely different franchise. I found the game lacked direction at times and a lot of the game consisted of walking around." (( '' Yep, recycled the branding, carelessly took it to Fantasy Lala-land, and tried to reuse many of the game elements no matter how much they didn't fit. '' )) ---- Infinite BS : "A Little Too Twee" "Twee" - As a derogatory descriptive, it means something that is affectedly dainty or quaint, or is way too sentimental. (( '' As long as there are gun-battles and splashing blood, it might as well have been muppets and cute ponies thrashing about in candyland Auschwitz, while Audio Diaries and 'signs' proclaim some absurd philosophy ... "WORK WILL TAKE YOU TO VALHALLA" '' )) ---- "The lobotomized god collapses the quantum supposition, so all the crap experience mixes together and flows into one insanity" (( Yeah that's about what Infinite BS was, a massive in-flowing of Bullshit. '' ) ---- "The pace of the game is so fast, the shooting so continuous, the push to “GET TO THE NEXT THING” so frantic, that it somehow feels like you never get to know the place." Its like a dark carnival ride that keeps you moving so that you can't notice how little is really there - that it is really all just cardboard cutouts and dangling strings." ---- "It gets to the point during the long middle of the game that the gameplay starts to hinder the story. A late, affecting section in a mental hospital, a section that is absolutely crucial to the story, is marred by the hordes of imaginary enemies the game forces you to bludgeon. I wanted to creep through the eerie halls of the place, absorbing mood and thinking about the twist the story had just taken. Instead, I was panicked about running out of ammunition for my machine gun. It’s as if, somehow, those masters of storytelling and atmosphere at Irrational don’t trust their storytelling and atmosphere." (( '' Bingo. '' )) "Infinite is an example of storytelling and world-building in which the main character is able to kill thousands of times more than he is killed, in which ammunition and “health” are everywhere, and in which you can come back from the dead endlessly by paying money. It is fundamentally strange." When all is said and done, Infinite BS was Just a sub-par Shooter Game with a story disjointedly told through an absurd fantasy plot. Players did not miss all-that-much by ignoring the confused story. ---- "Combat takes place, more often than not, within designed arenas, which means that Irrational's designers WANTED combat to happen. In System Shock 2, the levels were more often real spaces, just like BioShock. If combat happened, it did so because you got caught, not because the game had a fight scripted." ---- "Basically, BioShock Infinite, at a conceptual level, is just a shooter, because someone made poor decisions at the top. Imagine what it would be like if Comstock was desperate to keep news of Elizabeth out of the hands of the people, making it easier for you to blend in with the crowds ? Imagine of the game employed social stealth, like Hitman or Deus Ex, where you could talk your way out of situations. Imagine if the game learned all the lessons of the 'Shock' lineage it descends from, the same lessons employed by Far Cry 2, by Deus Ex, by Thief, by Dishonored, by STALKER, by System Shock 2. Imagine talking to people, rather than fighting them. Imagine losing yourself in a crowd, so the guards searching for you didn't fight. There was so much potential in the game... and they turned it into a series of fights. Violence in BioShock Infinite is absolutely excessive. It's violence for violence's sake." ---- "BioShock Infinite is a shooter with a problem, but the problem isn't the shooting. The problem is that BioShock Infinite has nothing to say about the shooting. A game that earnestly tries to explore morality and personal responsibility ducks those questions by placing the player on a conveyor belt of hyper-violent sequences, shuttling the player from one narrative set-piece to the next. The shooting is what you do. The story is what you (mostly) hear. The two have little to do with each other." ---- Commentary about BS:I Things Infinite BS was SUPPOSED TO HAVE * Non-aggressive NPC's that don't realize who you are until you do something drastic, and whom you an interact with in non-violent contextual circumstances. * Elizabeth reacts to the environment prompting conversations which build depth and character. Very dense scenes with NPC setpieces creating a far richer tapestry of the world that you are exploring. Only the opening level of the shipped product is as rich as this scene. * Vigors based on an inventory stock instead of a refillable Mana bar. * Very, very, very large environments with HUGE skyline segments, combat on the skylines, and "3D" combat (Ground, Skyline, Zeppelin) * AI that is noticeably more advanced than the current, including flanking and shifting to different levels in the environment to gain an advantage. * Dialogue present in the shipped product, but in dramatically different situations and context, implying that the story was scrapped and re-written VERY late in development (this is Q3 2011, remember). Elizabeth's line in the trailer where she mentions asking Comstock for help escaping is itself a potent indicator that the story was vastly different. * The flowing Vox banners feature Daisies face projected on them in a very 1984-esque fashion, highlighting her similarity to Comstock and adding narrative. There are few to no animated textures of this nature anywhere in the released game, and none on Vox topics. The voice-overs from these can still be heard, truncated, in a few sections. - Vox Ciphers & Crows Chests are both implied to be recurring elements, to the extent that they even feature voiced dialogue and in-game tutorials about them. Yet there are two ciphers and 3 crow chests, in the entire game. In the first level, after you find the first Crow chest, you enter a mansion and are given a tutorial prompt which suggests "Try not shooting your gun and drawing attention to yourself". Clearly this is a remnant of the 2011 build in that video, where enemies were not instant-hostile Zerglings, but is useless in the release build as all enemies shoot on sight. The previously inventory-based vigor system appears to have been changed very late in development, as the old pick-up bottles are still to be found scattered throughout levels, but now only act as Salt refills. The design of many early levels, such as Soldiers Field, feel very odd and out of context, and not designed for Combat. I suspect these were originally built as the "hub" levels when the game was more an open world, and then pared down when it was cut up into a linear shooter. There was an interview from 2010, discussed an artist quitting after they axed the Shantytown segment because it made little sense in the context of a floating nationalist utopia. Mysteriously, Shantytown was back in the release build. - The shipped game is clearly not the one that was in development for so long, and only a pale shadow in terms of depth in both gameplay and world building. The whole thing reeks of bad editing, with major themes and plot points that were introduced early being tossed out, and utterly random scenes (like the asylum) being included for no discernible reason. Wibbly-wobbly time nonsense began to take over and the exploration of a society like Columbia became irrelevant. ---- The Racists Will Rise Again -- A Player Commentary (*WARNING - POLITICAL OPINION EXPRESSED HEREIN*) : “BioShock Infinite”, is quite simply a left wing propaganda story laden with messages of “the religious are hateful bigots”, “the religious worship the US founding fathers”, “the religious blindly follow madmen and liars”, etc. The makers do a sad attempt at making them look like only the Confederates are like this, as the game takes place in 1912, and gives the impression the city of “Columbia” is made up of post-civil war Southern sympathizers. Throughout the game, it tries to show you that religion, American values, and the founding fathers are what caused the evil that is Columbia and Comstock. Columbia has statues commemorating George Washington (“Father Washington”), Benjamin Franklin (“Father Franklin”), and Thomas Jefferson (“Father Jefferson”), all part of Columbia’s own propaganda that actually contributes to the subtle propaganda this game tries to push. People pray to the founding fathers, to the Prophet, etc. like saints. It’s all rather sickening. The “Hall of Heroes” tries to justify the themes by making these “Americans” as Confederates that actually succeeded in their secession from the Union. I mean, it’s a city in the sky, who’s going to stop them in the late 1800s? They have paintings depicting Abraham Lincoln as a devil and other such images. Such a thing may have been excusable, except for their reasoning that religion causes evil and insanity (the propaganda of the game), and that free choice is but an illusion, according to their view of science (quantum mechanics and string theory). The whole premise is based upon a one-sided telling of the history of the USA as nothing but horrible and bad, with the founders being evil, white people being evil, and religion being the fuel of it all. I am surprised the hammer and sickle wasn’t used as a hero’s battle flag. This is a game, granted, I will give you that, but what is a shame is an ignorant view of religion, and America’s history. How much propaganda have you swollowed throughout your life before you made this game? May I suggest you actually study history, not from people telling you what it was, but by reading about it yourself from the sources themselves? Maybe, just maybe, you might want to read about those that were in support of the Constitution and founding fathers that were black, like Frederick Douglass, for example. You might want to read about Abraham Lincoln and the history of the party he helped found, as well as the history of the Democrat and Whig parties. You may learn that it was the religious that formed the Republican party, as a small government and anti-slavery party, and against everything the Whigs and Democrats were doing to the original statements of freedom the Constitution guaranteed to every man. You might want to investigate who the real bigots were, the ones that formed the Klu Klux Klan (the southern Democrat Party), the ones that wanted gun control to keep weapons out of the hands of recently freed slaves (the Democrat Party), the ones who were overwhelmingly in favor of secession for the sake of slavery (the southern Democrat Party), the ones who made the Jim Crow laws (Democrats), the ones who kept trying to outlaw the Jim Crow laws (Republicans of the time), etc. The Whigs were like the Republican party of today, not giving a rats ass about freedom and small government, nor the people. The Democrats haven’t changed much, just as racist, and with a heavy desire to enslave, except they now do it with government welfare and controlling education (indoctrination and dumbing-down the population), instead of whips and chains. The Democrats have convinced much of the populace that follows them, that the plantation is safe and desirable full of free stuff(!), and that they can’t take care of themselves. Sure, it’s just a game, but a game so obvious in its message, that you can’t hide behind “artistic license” as an excuse. Propaganda has reached an all time high with this game. Many people hail its ending. I nearly wanted to vomit, I was so disgusted with it. Where so-called religion becomes a problem, is where the people don’t practice what they preach. They use their position to exercise authority and control over others using their religion as an excuse. The religion itself isn’t the problem, it’s those falsely proclaiming to live it (a possible story explanation the game never indicates). This is why the USA was created in the first place. It kept the church out of the hands of the government. Unfortunately, now the church of atheism and environmentalism now has control over the government, and exercises tremendous tyranny against the religious. What am I saying? The entire premise of BioShock Infinite is a lie. It’s a house of cards that falls apart a few minutes into it, with anyone that knows anything about religion and US history, who hasn’t been indoctrinated by left wing propaganda of university professors hell bent on destroying both. ---- '''A Commentary on Columbia's Humongus/Grotesque Signage/Advertisements ' : The people on Columbia are trapped. They cannot get away from this awful environment blasting them in the face as they stroll the streets Forever. It is clearly overdone and ruins what little architectural finesse or style Columbia's buildings might have had. It has become a sad jumbled and cluttered and festooned gaggle of buildings welded oddly onto each other. Look at any picture of the 1893 Exposition to see how to be aesthetic. The crass overwhelming commercialization nature of it all flies in the face of the whole intended HOLY City of Eden idea. (( '' Levine & Co should have made up their minds about what actually Columbia was. '' )) Small reasonable signs should be placed appropriate. Most of those gross advertisement would be restricted. Signs should NOT be marring every view. It is also a matter of cost and maintenance expenses for businesses, who should not have such monstrous signs cost as much as furnishing the interior of their store. A huge sign's maintenance bills would eat most of the owner's profits. These realities seem lost on the games makers. (( '' Its kinda like the Infinite BS game company's having spent the second $100 million on Marketing, INSTEAD of developing a better game (or not needing to spend as much -- which of course ate into the profits the parent company wanted. '' )) ---- Implied Meaning of BioShock Infinite : "The bad guy is a result of baptism and religion. The good guy uses his own intellect and muscle for redemption; which he gains by giving his own life. Bigotry and misery are shown to be a result of religion (Christianity in this case, as the baptism was clearly Christian considering the preacher says “give your sins to Jesus”). Freedom and understanding is shown to come from your own intellect and by understanding science. That Free choice is an illusion, as all alternate choices have been made in an alternate reality already." (( '' Comstock and Columbia, when inspected, have little to do with Real Christianity. The resemblance is being used by Levine and the writers to try to divisively infer that is what the historic time is about, to the ignorant. The question : is it the result of bad writing or intentional propaganda ?'' )) ---- Infinite Propaganda Technique in The Game : "The Propaganda in the game was not explained. So many of the philosophical points actually have no actual telling in the game, yet were added indirectly into the game’s narrative to make it visible; a perfect propaganda technique. Nobody quite states it, nobody shows it, no narrator explains it, no quote on a loading screen describes it. However, what is actually seen in the game, and the message that is actually being exposed, without reading in some sort of deeper meaning, is simply : “The bad guy is a result of baptism and religion”, and that “white religion is full of sick bigoted fanatics that want to exploit others.” THAT is actually what the game illustrates. The reason why my explanation holds up, is that the act of baptism itself is shown to be what actually causes Booker to be Comstock. It doesn’t show what was taught to him before and after. It shows no history. It just shows a baptism. The game then says that no matter what happens after baptism, HE is Comstock, thus baptism is the evil. Remember, in this game, Booker has done this over and over, at least 122 times already, and each time Comstock is the result of this "Christian" baptism. That is what is shown. The solution in the game is a simplistic “pulling out the root”… As to Free Will, some in Science (String Theory) say it is an illusion. Sorry, that is exactly what they state. In fact, their response to a Free Will claim is “the actions of electrons prove free will is an illusion”. Such books as “The Elegant Universe”, “The Cosmic Landscape” (a joke to read), and its alter-ego “Not Even Wrong”, state similar. In fact, the most frequently asked question to those discussing String Theory and Quantum Mechanics is “does free will even exist ?” (( '' If free will is as illusion, then nothing those doubters say means anything or matters, nor is anything they do an achievement or have value. As THEY define it, it all is just a deterministic puppet show being watched by soulless puppets -- all devoid of good and bad, all merely is just dust swirling about. They must be very sad people to believe this. '' )) ---- "It kills me that in Infinite the only effort spent explaining or justifying how Gears worked or why they belonged in Columbia was slapping a "Fink" sticker to them. As a result, for me, they feel like this glaring game play mechanic that was only included in the game because, "well Bioshock 1 and 2 had gene tonics, and since this is a Bioshock game, we have to have them too". I just wish the same effort was made to blend this gameplay mechanic with world building." ---- "The moment the game's story lost much credibility was when you hop into another reality to find Chen Lin. The Lutece Twins are waxing philosophical about their coin and you and Elizabeth both decide it is a good idea to go to another reality because Chen isn't dead at that spot. Booker seems too unworried about this. These Tears are mysterious. Dangerous maybe. And how do you know Chen isn't dead in another room? Even if you find Chen and his tools, how do you get them to your original reality? What if in this new reality, mighty Cthulhu has returned and has once again claimed Earth as his? When they do find the tools, Booker even says something along the lines of, "Great, how will we get these weapons to Fitz? We should have thought this through." I love when writers blurt out their thoughts to the characters. Also its real exciting to be talking calmly about mutliple realities, and our main protagonists don't even formulate plans around it. They eventually hop to yet another reality where the revolutionary war has begun and they basically quit trying to find her guns because they figure they can just get the airship which cancels the last two hours you spent looking for tools making it all pointless. They probably could have ignored Fitz and took another airship. I even tried to work around this with saying the message of the game was about the pointlessness of everything which is a theme in multiple realities since there are an infinite number of you and you are not special. But the end of the game makes your Booker, the playable protagonist, the centre Booker; thus, when you die all things will be set right - which kills that motif. Maybe Levine added this because he felt gamers would be unsatisfied with coming to this realization, so he added the silly drowning to give a false sense of closer? But then he RetCons this anyway with his DLC, so that's a pointless thing. What I listed are pretty much plot holes and inconsistencies, which for a story driven game is a massive detriment." ---- Yet another Player Commentary About the BioShock Infinite game : I played it when it came out, hated it. Couldn't really put my finger on why though. However I gave it a second chance and played it again and really really focused. And it was worse than I remember it being. I spent 25% of the time actually playing the game. The other 75% was being forced to go along in an interactive movie about a dumb multiverse paradox that was poorly delivered, and which I really didn't care about. First half of the game is getting Elizabeth. Then you spend 5 minutes tiptoeing around racism and revolution which the writers obviously were too PC or immature to actually discuss. You learn nothing from it, and Fitzroy is killed just as she appears. Then you turn around and the entire city is burning. But who cares? We now have to run off and get Comstock. But first we fight the ghost of his wife 3 times. Why? Because we need DNA for the door? We get to Comstock and the whole "Constants and Variables" bullshit is shoved at me for like THIRTY MINUTES, and I'm not even playing the game anymore. I'm walking from door to door. I can appreciate a really deep, intelligent story wrapped around an immersive environment. Bioshock 1 was this. Bioshock 2 was this. You play those games with full player agency, and you come away a thinking human being. Infinite though ? Its laughable and worrisome that people called this game "genius level" writing. How ??????! I'm legit mad right now because I just played an 8 hour quicktime event about jumping from dimension to dimension. Nothing in this game is intelligent and the game takes itself far too seriously. Attempting to impress more than what its worth. Its pretentious. A brief list of what I despise about this game: * Not the Beauty of the city, but it has no sense of scale and zero interactivity for the player and its people. The game Introduces racism but is too 'PC' to actually talk about it. Every potential thought provoking idea is dropped in favour of the stupid multiple universes crap. You can't call this game genius level writing when it can't introduce and deliver mature concepts aimed to expand thinking and perspective. * Voxophones do nothing to introduce any history or nuance about the city. Whenever I wanted to listen to the shitty Voxophones, Elizabeth frequently starts talking about it, interrupting. * Absolutely zero choice. Even Jack in BS1 had agency. * Vigors are in the game only as a nod to BS1/BS2. They are unimmersive in the world of Infinite. Most of them are literally just stuns... They are blindly added. * Amazingly HUGE step backwards in level design and FPS mechanics. Linear corridor and staggered arena shootouts. Zero exploration. Zero interest to have a look around. Lockpicked containers are mostly trash. Enemies were just bullet sponges. 2 weapon limit with silly upgrades. * Zero sense in the gears. Most of them are relevant to Skylines... but most of the fighting happens off of them. You cannot build a character, you play the same guy over and over again. Zero agency. * Elizabeth is locked in a tower her whole life. The minute you break her out, she is immortal, able to find you things and is handling herself better than Doomguy. Despite having zero outdoor experience. "B-b-but, she learned through tears and books!". So why do I need to break her out? Stupid. * Dumb infinite timelines... Its not elegant nor is it intelligent. Time/multiverse paradoxes exist only for interesting conversations. Not for games or movies. See Avengers End Game or MK10/MK11 and to a small extent, X-Men Days of Future Past. Time travel, etc, meant that every player action had zero consequence. There is no line to be drawn when jumping from time to time or universe to universe to recorrect an event in a previous time line. * When you travel to the Revolution universe, Elizabeth is continually treated as if she is the Elizabeth from that universe ... This is a huge plot hole and is a big irritation along with the other alternate universes issues. * Bioshock 2 fixed all of Bioshock 1's problems and didn't have any of Infinite's problems. Yet its generally placed lower than Infinite???? * Incredibly large amount of scripted sequences ... Supposed to be a game not a walking sim. * "INFINITE UNIVERSES BRO. 2DEEP4U" Its a stupid thing to base a game on and afflict the player with. ---- . .